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China’s Wildlife Disappearing, New Report Says

An egret is silhouetted at sunset while sitting on a tree in the forest in Xinjian county, Jiangxi province, China.

Zuma Press

China’s wildlife is vanishing at an alarming clip, a new report has found.

The Middle Kingdom’s population of terrestrial vertebrates – including mammals, amphibians, birds, reptiles – has fallen by nearly one half over the past four decades, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

That gloomy stat is in keeping with trends around the globe, which saw the number of vertebrates drop by 52% between 1970 and 2010, WWF said.

Among the animals in the Middle Kingdom tracked by the nonprofit’s report, there were clear winners and losers. Reptiles and amphibians took the biggest hit during the 1970-2010 period, with their numbers dropping by a staggering 97%, in part because of the frenzied hunt for traditional Chinese medicine supplies and encroachment on their habits, the authors said. Likewise, numbers of forest mammals—such as musk deer and snub-nosed monkeys—fell by 78%.

Birds, by contrast, fared better and in some cases actually thrived after years of harrowing losses under Mao Zedong, whose late-1950s “four pests” campaign pushed China’s sparrow population to the brink. The WWF found that the bird population staged an overall comeback since 1970, growing by 43% in part due to the expansion of nature reserves.

The report also found that China’s demands on the environment have more than doubled since the 1970s, as the country’s living standards have risen. China now requires an average of 2.2 global hectares of land per person to maintain its standard of living, the report found. (In the U.S., the number is around 7.) The figure represents the amount of terrain needed for crops, urbanization, logging, forest to absorb carbon dioxide emissions and more.

In 1980, less than one-fifth of China’s population was living in cities and towns; by 2012, that figure had grown to more than one half, the WWF said.

Still, one bright spot emerged in the study. In China, the rise in hectares of land per person needed to maintain living standards has been “relatively small” compared to the per-capita wealth in China’s provinces, the report said. “This may be related to China’s deep-rooted tradition of frugality,” the authors wrote. As well, they found that the per-capita figure in Beijing and Shanghai has actually dropped, thanks to improved energy efficiency.

The report comes as Chinese state media have in recent weeks celebrated the news that some of the country’s endangered animals, such as the Przewalski gazelle and a group of gibbons, have made small comebacks. The nation’s most fêted species, the giant panda, has also seen its ranks again swell by nearly 17% to around 2,000 within the past decade, according to the country’s most recent survey.

While some have criticized China for playing megafauna favorites in its love for pandas at the expense of other wildlife, recent research has found that the nation’s bamboo-eater obsession has helped shield other species that also benefit from panda habitat conservation efforts.